Project Blue Book

Rating:
Summary: Very informative
Review: Lots of documents included and pictures in this book that you could delve over for hours. Thing I didn't understand is why the 1947 crash at Roswell, NM was not listed. Maybe it wasn't a part of Blue Book originally, I don't know. But otherwise, a MUST have in your library for any serious UFO Researcher!

Rating:
Summary: A "middle-of-the-road" UFO Book
Review: This book, originally published in 1976, offered readers one of the first looks at the (then) recently declassified, once top-secret files of Project Blue Book, the US Air Force's official investigation of the UFO phenomenon. Blue Book was originally named Project Sign and was created in late 1947 in the wake of the first widely publicized UFO sightings, including Kenneth Arnold's famous sighting of nine "flying saucers" near Mt. Rainier, Washington. In 1948 the name was changed to Project Grudge, and finally in 1951 it was given the name of Blue Book, which it would retain until it was shut down for good in 1969. Steiger, a UFO researcher with some strange beliefs about the paranormal (read his "Mysteries of Time and Space", an often bizarre book), does a pretty good job of editing the book, which is basically the files (usually printed verbatim) of several famous UFO incidents which Blue Book investigated from 1948 to the mid-1960's. Unfortunately, the book is weakened by Steiger's insistence on featuring several cases which even prominent ufologists such as Jerome Clark and J. Allen Hynek believed could be explained as "normal" phenomenon. One example is the famous Mantell crash in Kentucky in January 1948. Captain Mantell, a veteran fighter pilot, was ordered to intercept a UFO over Fort Knox. He climbed to 25,000 feet and reported that he was chasing a metallic object of "tremendous size" - and then the airbase lost contact with him. His plane crashed a few moments later and Mantell was killed. Although some newspapers and wild rumors claimed that Mantell had been shot down by a UFO "Death Ray", it is now almost certain that Mantell was chasing a Skyhook balloon, which in 1948 was a top-secret project which Mantell would not have been aware of. His plane was not equipped with oxygen, and once he reached 25,000 feet he passed out and then crashed. Steiger, however, insists that the Mantell case is "unresolved" despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. He also insists that several other well-known cases are still "unexplained" and wastes many pages on them with files from Blue Book, this in spite of evidence (again, supplied mostly by ufologists) that the cases do have a more "normal" explanation. However, Steiger does give plenty of space to other, more important cases that are still unexplained despite the best efforts of skeptics and ufologists alike. The two best sections of the book, in my opinion, are the Blue Book files from Kenneth Arnold's famous 1947 sighting that started the UFO phenomenon, and the classic 1964 incident in Socorro, N.M., in which a respected policeman witnessed a UFO land and saw several "crewmen" in strange uniforms outside the craft. When the "crewmen" saw him they returned to the UFO and it took off, burning nearby bushes and leaving landing marks in the ground. For these cases alone Steiger's book is worth buying, although his insistence that the Mantell crash and some others are still "unexplained" doesn't help increase his credibilty with more skeptical readers who are familiar with the UFO phenomenon.

Rating:
Summary: A good UFO "primary resource" book even without Roswell...
Review: To answer the reviewer's question below, the reason that this book doesn't include anything about the supposed UFO "crash" near Roswell, NM in July 1947 is because the Roswell crash was virtually unknown to the public until the 1980's, and this book was originally published in 1976. One of the myths about the Roswell crash is that it created the UFO phenomenon in America, when in fact it was the well-publicized sighting by Kenneth Arnold, a private pilot and businessman, in June 1947 that led to the first great wave of UFO sightings in America. The Roswell UFO crash was completely forgotten by the public (and, apparently, the Air Force) within a few days of the public announcement that a crashed "flying disk" had been recovered near Roswell. Instead, this book concentrates on printing the recently declassified, once top-secret files of Project Blue Book, the US Air Force's official investigation of UFOs from late 1947 until late 1969, when it was officially shut down. Brad Steiger presents the original case files, field investigation reports, and scientific studies conducted by Project Blue Book for several famous UFO cases, most of which will be familiar to UFO buffs. Among the cases studied are the Kenneth Arnold sighting; the 1948 "Mantell Incident" in which a veteran fighter pilot was killed while chasing a UFO over Kentucky; the 1948 Gorman UFO "dogfight" in which a fighter pilot chased a UFO at night over Fargo, ND for a half-hour before finally giving up and returning to base; the files on the famed Washington UFO "Invasion" in July 1952 when several strange lights were seen over the nation's capital, detected by radar at two airports, and chased by fighters; the 1951 "Lubbock Lights" case in which science professors at Texas Tech University spotted strange lights over the city of Lubbock and a Texas Tech student took photos of them; and the 1964 UFO "landing" in Socorro, NM in which Lonnie Zamora, a respected local policeman, claimed to see a large egg-shaped object with two "men" in spacesuits in the desert outside of town. When the "men" saw him they boarded the craft and it took off, burning nearby bushes and rocking Zamora's patrol car. This case was thoroughly examined by Project Blue Book's staff, and it was the only case of a UFO "landing" which Blue Book labeled as "unsolved", and possibly genuine. This book also offers other case files of UFO reports, and other "primary" research data which UFO researchers might find valuable. Overall, this is a good sourcebook of Blue Book and Air Force data on UFOs. However, it offers little beyond the case file reports, and the fact that some of these cases have been labeled as "solved" even by pro-UFO researchers, such as the Mantell Crash (he was almost certainly chasing a top-secret Skyhook balloon), and the Gorman "dogfight" (he was chasing a lighted weather balloon released a few miles away), does slightly reduce the book's value. Still, it's definitely worth buying for the remaining "unsolved" cases (Socorro, Kenneth Arnold, etc.). Recommended.